That's fine tepples. The description is not super important to me; I just don't want the twist to be spoiled. For the future, it's probably better you don't get involved in changing such things though. Too much controversy.

Thank you. I'll split this digression so that we can convert it to a more general discussion of whether we want bait and switch to continue to be a part of our community multicarts.

If we're broadening the discussion, then my answer is absolutely yes. As long as it's in good nature and not malicious intent, a game based on just an experience or surprise is perfectly fine.

"Games" like that might not do well commercially for obvious reasons, but this competition is not about commercial viability. It's about encouraging people to make cool things for the NES. People don't tend to buy a competition multicart with the primary motivation of getting great games -- they do it because they are interested in what the community comes up with, and want to support that. Limiting that just because you don't personally like a certain type of game design doesn't seem like a useful decision to me.

I feel like a thread on the topic for constructive discussion is in order (edit: I'm late). Sometimes I feel like small changes are ok, for my game's description some of the text got clipped off and I didn't mind because I felt like I made a political statement on it by accident:

Quote:

You are a cute unidentified lifeform that, for some reason, has to break walls of different layouts. Some people theorize that he's an alien that picked up transmissions of the Reagan speech which had the famous quote "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" and came a little bit late to the party.

I just thought it was a stupid little joke about the Berlin Wall and stray TV signals in space but I completely forgot about Donald Trump's Build the Wall campaign, I honestly instantly regretted submitting that blurb into the competition email. Not sure if it was cut because of that or just for the sake of brevity but I didn't mind either way. But what if I did want the whole text reproduced on the menu screen? Outside of technical reasons that's a very tough question to answer.

_________________This is a block of text that can be added to posts you make. There is a 255 character limit.

I think mentioning Raegans famous wall speech (which is just a piece of recent history that happened) is pretty innocuous? I guess anything that could be tied to politics or national sovereignty is a slippery slope, but for example "sinking feeling" seemed to be well recieved all around. It was a joke, and it played on a diplomatic schism, but all in all it was innocently made.

#1 thing to avoid: caricatures, especially caricature of a political standpoint, religious belief or precarious position in the social strata.

Another fear I have is that this bait and switch fad might become overplayed in the next compo, as it did at times with interruption fads on YTMND like the entrance themes of professional wrestlers Muhammad Hassan and John Cena, "NEDM", "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition", "Never Gonna Give You Up", and the like. I don't want everyone thinking they have to outdo each other with a first episode twist in imitation of the visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club, as if Pikmin were described as a game about Olimar piloting the Dolphin.

One possible policy is "Give full control of the description and screenshot to the entrant, within the limits of width, height, and color." Do we want this to extend as far as leaving spelling errors alone, or inconsistency in how the buttons are named?

Or we could allow an entrant to elect full control at the cost of allowing only 15 lines of description with [sic] on its own line afterward. It'd be shorter than The author provided the following description while remaining honest about who had editorial control for a given entry.

Spelling/grammar errors in NES games never were a problem historically

If writing an article for a newspaper, you can expect the editor to modify and cut your writing. If they have time, they get back to you and inform you of the changes, but because it's a daily print, there's just no time to ping-pong edits back and forth.

If you're writing an article for an biannual journal, you'd expect to have editorial feedback and a mutual agreement between author and editor being part of the process.

One possible policy is "Give full control of the description and screenshot to the entrant, within the limits of width, height, and color." Do we want this to extend as far as leaving spelling errors alone, or inconsistency in how the buttons are named?

This isn't this complicated. For something like that, I'd just suggest you let people create their own descriptions, but as an editor, help to correct errors or suggest slight improvements. There's a BIG difference between "I completely changed your description because I didn't like it" and "I've fixed a typo and reformatted this slightly to make it work better."

Are you sure you want to include URLs that might not work anymore in a few years in the game descriptions? Not that typing those forum URLs is convenient to begin with... QR codes would've been cooler!

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